1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of instant messaging and more particularly to presence awareness for instant messaging.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic mail, referred to in the art as e-mail, has proven to be the most widely used computing application globally. Though e-mail has been a commercial staple for several decades, due to the explosive popularity and global connectivity of the Internet, e-mail has become the preferred mode of asynchronous communications, regardless of the geographic separation of communicating parties. Today, more e-mails are processed in a single hour than phone calls. Clearly, e-mail as an asynchronous mode of communications has been postured to replace all other modes of communications excepting voice telephony.
In contrast to the asynchronous nature of e-mail, the recent rapid development of the Internet has led to advanced modes of synchronous, real-time collaboration able to fulfill the real-time communicative requirements of the modern computing participant. Using the Internet as a backbone, individuals worldwide can converge in real-time in cyberspace to share ideas, documents and images in a manner not previously possible through conventional telephony and video conferencing. To facilitate collaboration over the Internet, a substantial collection of synchronous messaging technologies and protocols have been assembled to effectively deliver audio, video and data over the single data communications medium of the Internet. These synchronous messaging technologies include several, real-time human-to-human collaborative environments such as instant messaging and persistent chat rooms.
In the conventional instant messaging and chat environment, different collaborators can engage in a real-time exchange of messages including text messages, graphical information and even audiovisual information in a common messaging space. The common messaging space can accommodate a pair of conversants to a chat, or multiple conversants to a conference. In some circumstances, the initiation of the chat can be spontaneous upon one conversant recognizing the presence and availability of a partner conversant. In other circumstances, the initiation of the chat can be planned and can even subsist in a calendared event in a calendaring and scheduling system.
Conventional instant messengers rely upon presence awareness in assisting users with the establishment of a chat session with other users. Presence awareness refers to the ability of the instant messaging system to determine when a user is available to engage in a chat session. Generally, presence awareness can be manually established by each user through a selection of a number of states ranging from “I am available” to “Away from computer” to “Do Not Disturb”. Alternatively, presence awareness can be established automatically by sensing activity in a computer. Idleness past a threshold duration of time can be indicative to the absence of a user and the state of the user can be set by the presence awareness logic of the instant messaging system accordingly.
Situations oftentimes arise where one individual intends to contact another individual through instant messaging, but cannot establish contact as the other individual is not sitting at his computer. This can be particularly frustrating if individuals are geographically separated—where it is not possible to physically locate the other individual in person. In situations like these, the initiating individual may wait to type and send the instant message until the other conversant is available for instant messaging. If enough time goes by or the initiating individual becomes distracted, he may forget to send the instant message at a later time. Even if he later remembers he had a message to send, the initiating individual may take a while to remember the subject matter of the instant message he intended to send. This can be annoying and time-consuming for the user. The inability to immediately contact the desired conversant in such circumstances can injure productivity through failed or canceled communications and lost time in recalling earlier intended communications.